


Cursed Doll

by Marsalias



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Danny has a bad time, Gen, Things get spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23162461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marsalias/pseuds/Marsalias
Summary: Danny's having dreams of mirrors and chains. (Help me with this summary, I beg you.)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 135





	Cursed Doll

The floor was smooth and hard beneath him, but it didn’t feel bad to lie on. He brushed his fingers over the surface and frowned as he heard chimes and clinks and felt a weight around his wrist. He moved his other hand towards the first, feeling the same weight there, but came up short as something tugged sharply on both his wrists and his neck. 

Reluctantly, Danny opened his eyes. 

In front of him was a mirror. He blinked and then heaved himself up into a sitting position. Doing so yanked his hands down. 

A thin metal band circled each of his wrists and his neck. They were connected by a chain that was also looped through a ring on the ground. Each end of the chain was fused to the bands on his wrists, and the collar had a loop on it, much like the floor. The effect was such that he could only raise one of the three by lowering the others. He could sit quite comfortably on the floor, but he couldn’t stand, and to raise his arm completely he would have to almost be laying down. 

Interesting. 

Disturbing, but interesting. None of the bands or chain links had anything resembling seams or locks. All of it was completely smooth. They were also thickly padded where they would otherwise touch his skin, giving them a squishy, almost pillow-like feel.

Danny decided to blame a ghost. That was usually a safe bet where he was concerned, though he didn’t recognize this modus operandi. 

The seven mirrored walls of the room he was in were just beyond his reach, even if he stretched himself to his fullest extent and groped with his toes. 

He returned to a sitting position and licked his lips. It didn’t look like there were any people around, but he could never be too careful. He’d had too many close calls, and the mirrors were making him nervous. They made him feel like he was being watched.

On the other hand, it didn’t look like there was a mundane way out of this. Danny let his ghost half rise slightly and activated his intangibility. 

Nothing happened. 

He sighed. He had been expecting that. A ghost would make their prison ghost-proof. He tugged on the chain again, this time leaning on his _human_ intangibility, the kind that would serve in the Ghost Zone. 

Nothing happened. 

Either this place was human-proofed, too well established to bend to Danny’s will, or it wasn’t in the Ghost Zone. 

He frowned down at his hands as they rested in his lap. Well, intangibility wasn’t the only trick in his book. He called on his ice powers, hoping to make the cuffs or chain cold enough to break. 

Nothing happened. 

No. That was wrong. Even if the metal held, ice still should have formed. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t feel his ghost half. His powers hadn’t been turned off, like with the Plasmius Maximus.

Increasingly worried, Danny began to test his other powers. Invisibility, flight, ghost rays, none of it worked. Finally, throwing caution to the wind, Danny tried to go ghost. 

He stayed human. 

How? Why? He didn’t-

“Because sometimes, it’s nice to be helpless.”

Danny jumped, his head snapping up to stare into a mirror. He saw himself, and behind him, he saw…

… also himself. 

But _Phantom_ him. 

He spun as best he could, restrained as he was. No one was there. He looked into the mirror that now stood opposite him. There was Phantom again, standing behind Danny, just out of his line of sight. He twisted. Again, the mirrors showed Phantom standing behind Danny. 

An illusion?

At least, Danny thought so, right up until Phantom put his hand on his shoulder and knelt behind him. Once again, Danny tried to turn, to look at him directly, but Phantom put a hand under his chin and pulled backwards, firmly but gently, until the back of Danny’s head was resting on his chest. 

Their eyes met in the mirror, and Danny opened his mouth to ask who this was, and what he wanted, because, obviously, this wasn’t him. This wasn’t Danny, this wasn’t Phantom. 

Nothing came out but a soft, animalistic whine. 

“There, there,” said (not?) Phantom, soothingly. “No need to be so panicked. It won’t help anything.”

To Danny’s intense horror, his core responded to the words, settling and dragging his heart rate down with it. He tried to reach up, to throw this imposter off, but with his head held steady, and his hands bound the way they were, he couldn’t do anything.

“Stop that, you’ll hurt yourself,” said Phantom, reaching down to lightly swat at Danny’s hands. Danny glared, but Phantom just smiled. “See? Isn’t that better? Just relax. There’s nothing to worry about, because there’s nothing you can do.”

Danny tried to demand to know what Phantom was talking about, but the only sound that emerged from his throat was even more pathetic than before. 

“Nothing you can say, nothing you can do… It’s comforting, isn’t it? It isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have prevented this.”

Danny kicked backwards, but Phantom simply wrapped his ghostly tail around Danny’s legs. He twitched, fidgeted, and tried to shout. Phantom simply held on. Danny never caught so much as a glimpse of him, except through a mirror. Danny’s voice never grew louder than a whisper, nor more intelligible than a hiss. 

What had happened to him?

Eventually, he began to tire, his already ineffectual struggles growing weaker. 

“There you go,” murmured Phantom in his ear. 

Danny watched him split off a third, then a fourth, arm. He tensed, waiting for a blow. But the fake Phantom simply started carding fingers through Danny’s hair. 

It felt good. 

Danny didn’t get a lot of gentle physical contact in his life. His parents, though loving, were rather rough. Sam wasn’t the type to explicitly show affection. Tucker was going through a ‘no homo’ phase (courtesy of Dash’s bullying). Jazz gave him attention, but there was a limit to how many hugs his teenage pride would accept from his older sister. 

Still, was he really so touch starved that he would accept this from an enemy wearing his own face?

“There, isn’t this better? I can take care of you. You don’t even have to make a decision. There’s no need. It’s already done.” One of his many hands brushed Danny’s throat-

-and he woke up, his sheet wrapped around a neck. He was panting. 

It was a dream. It had been a dream.

He worked the blanket off his neck and slumped in relief. A dream. A weird dream, but still just a dream. 

.

He felt half-asleep more than half-ghost as he stumbled down the stairs later that morning. His body felt weird and heavy, uncooperative in the extreme. His skin crawled as if it wanted to be somewhere else. Every breath he took made his head spin. 

“I think I’m sick,” he announced to his parents.

They looked up from their discussion of their latest invention, blueprints for which were spread liberally over the dining room table. 

“Oh, no, sweetie,” said Maddie, standing. Her words sounded distant. “Do you have a temperature?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny. “Can I stay home today?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Oh,” said Danny. 

“That’s a bummer, Danno!” boomed Jack, voice wavering as though underwater. “We were looking forward to telling you about the ghost trap we just finished! It uses mirrors to-!”

“Maybe later, Jack. Here, Danny, let me get you something to eat, and then you can go back to bed.”

“Okay,” said Danny, listlessly. 

.

He crawled back under his covers and fell asleep. When he woke again, he was back in the mirrored room, but the nature of his bindings had changed.

He was strapped securely into a chair, and although he still had a collar, it was very different. As before, it was still made of polished metal, but, instead of a thin band, it more resembled the neck braces doctors put on people who had been in car accidents. He couldn’t turn his head at all. He couldn’t even look down at himself properly. 

The only way to see what was going on was to look in the mirror.

Phantom stood behind him, smiling kindly. 

Danny sighed. This was a lot easier to cope with, when he knew it was just a dream. A dream he should probably discuss with Jazz, because, man, it was creepy, but still just a dream. 

“Is it?” asked Phantom.

The growl rising in Danny’s throat as the only rejoinder he could make quickly morphed into a purr as Phantom started to stroke his hair. Embarrassed, even in the dream, he tried to force the sound down. 

Phantom chuckled. “Don’t try to fight it, because you can’t. All you’ll succeed in is making yourself miserable. I don’t want you to be miserable. Do you?”

Danny couldn’t respond in any meaningful way, so he didn’t.

Next to the chair was a small table. Tools that Danny couldn’t identify at this angle were laid out on its surface. Phantom reached for them and came up with a q-tip. He started cleaning Danny’s ears. 

In short order, Danny’s purrs became interspersed with almost-inaudible hums and wordless mumbles. He hadn’t realized that getting his ears cleaned could feel _good._

He almost felt disappointed when Phantom put down the q-tip. Even if this was just a dream. 

But then Phantom picked up a washcloth and began rubbing behind Danny’s ears, dislodging dirt he didn’t even know was there. He was completely relaxed.

This was a very strange dream, but it wasn’t a bad one. 

Phantom put down the washcloth and picked up a comb. With exaggerated carefulness, he began to wash and comb Danny’s hair. 

Danny’s core must have approved, because he was purring so hard it was almost painful. Half his mind was full of the sound of his own core, the other half was occupied with the sensation of being groomed. He barely noticed that his hair grew longer and thicker with each stroke of the comb.

The weight of it as it curled around his shoulders was oddly comforting. It made him feel drowsy and grounded.

When Danny’s hair was long enough to pool on the floor, Phantom began to draw it back into a complicated series of braids. He spoke quietly as he worked, but Danny couldn’t make out any of the words over his purring. Thinking too hard about the patterns in the braids and the things Phantom was weaving into his hair made his brain go fuzzy. 

Oh, well. It wasn’t important anyway. This was just a dream. 

.

Danny woke feeling even worse than before, and hungry on top of that. His stomach rolled and grumbled, and his muscles shivered in exhaustion. Even closed, his eyes felt dry and sticky.

He shifted, hoping to escape back into dreams until he felt better, but something caught around his wrist. Groaning hoarsely, he pried his bleary eyes open. 

Oh, it was just a strand of his hair.

Wait.

He scrambled out of bed, and discovered, to his intense dismay, that even when he was standing at his full height his hair was long enough to trail on the floor.

Not just a dream. _Not_ just a dream. 

Now that he was fully awake, Danny began to feel something else, something emanating from downstairs. Something horrible, something he didn’t like and wanted nothing to do with, and yet… It called to him, drawing him in. 

He stopped himself, thinking, trying to reason out what could have caused this. He tugged on his hair and thought about his dream. Mirrors. Where else had he heard about mirrors, recently? His parents had bought some the other day, and then, this morning, they had been talking about mirrors, hadn’t they?

A ghost trap. They had been talking about a ghost trap that used mirrors. That had to be causing this, somehow. He had to go downstairs and break it. 

He shuffled to the door, his vision swaying and blurring with each step, his head bent from the unaccustomed weight of his hair. Twice, before he even got to the door, he had to untangle himself.

As soon as the door was open, the feeling of being pulled got stronger, and, without conscious consent, he found himself running to the stairs. He was going too fast for his dampened reflexes to keep up. He tripped over his hair on the third step and tumbled down.

.

He was sitting in a chair, but a chair that was built as a cage. The arms curved, lovingly, around his torso, and the legs wrapped around his. The thick padded collar still kept him looking dead ahead, into the mirror in front of him, but his arms, unlike before, were free. 

In front of him was a table, piled high with food, and a single formal place setting. The plates, utensils, and cups were all mirror-bright silver. 

He brought his hands up to feel at the collar, hoping to find some way of getting it off, but its outside was as smooth and seamless as it had been the first time. 

“Go ahead,” whispered not-Phantom, abruptly directly behind him. “Eat.”

Danny had forgotten how hungry he was, but now his body reminded him, violently. The scents of the foods on the table, all his favorites, tickled at his nose and scratched at his brain. He reached out towards the fork and knife.

Then he remembered: Not a dream. 

Something Sam had told him once, about accepting food from fairies, spiked across his mind. 

He let his hands fall back into his lap. 

Phantom sighed, and Danny could feel his ice-cold breath on the top of his head. “I had hoped we could do this the easy way. When will you learn that you don’t have a choice?” 

He began to rub Danny’s shoulders, and Danny’s body once again betrayed him by deciding it felt good. He never purred this loud when he was awake. What was wrong with him?

Then Phantom’s hands slipped _inside_ Danny’s shoulders. He fought against the overshadowing, but, like everything else in this not-dream, there was nothing he could do. With Danny’s hands, Phantom delicately picked up the fork and knife and began feeding Danny. 

It would have been easier to take if the food wasn’t delicious. 

When all of the plates were clean, Phantom stepped backwards out of Danny, leaving him limp and emotionally exhausted. 

Something began to ooze out of the corners of his eyes. Not tears. It was thick, viscous, and silver. A moment later, it began to drip from his nose and then his mouth and ears. It reached his chin, and a long strand fell to his chest.

Phantom patted his head. 

“Almost there.”

.

Danny woke, gasping for air, at the bottom of the staircase. His eyes were stuck shut. 

Using the wall, he clawed his way into a sitting position and scrubbed at his eyes. Eventually, he was able to force them open. His hands were covered in silver. His face was still leaking silver. It dripped from his mouth in thick strands. He tried to spit it out, but there was more to take its place. 

Standing and walking to the kitchen was a challenge. Between the silver in his eyes and the hair falling across his face, he was almost blind, and he was pretty sure the fall had given him a concussion. It was hard to breathe through the silver goo, too. His nose had been completely converted into a faucet for the stuff. Every time he blinked, it got harder to open his eyes. 

He stopped, leaning against the kitchen table, panting. He had to get down, to the lab, to stop the trap from doing _whatever_ the _heck_ this was to him, but he was so tired. If he took just a minute…

.

This time he was alone. This time he was standing. The thin collar was back, but this time the chain was attached to the ceiling. 

There had to be a pattern, some rhyme or reason, but he couldn’t see what it was. 

Silver dripped down his front, and he coughed wetly.

The end of his long braid bounced against the backs of his ankles as he turned. He had much more freedom of movement, this time around, even if the chain was too short for him to sit down. What would happen if he could get to a mirror? If he could break one here? Could he get out?

He walked towards the walls, but came up short, just over an arm’s length away. Even standing on his tip toes, extending the reach of the chain as far as he could, he couldn’t get any closer. 

He started to pace, but his shortness of breath soon exhausted him, and he was reduced to standing in the center of the room, focusing on breathing. There was nothing he could do here, nothing but wake up- But he couldn’t figure out how to _do_ that. 

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think, but the sick fog around his thoughts from the real world had followed him here. 

“You’re starting to understand, now.” The words were almost inaudible through the layer of ooze that filled his ears.

Danny jumped, and tried to open his eyes, but they were firmly sealed shut. He gurgled and backed away. The chain clinked, and suddenly it was pulling down instead of up. Danny dropped to his knees, and he could feel not-Phantom in front of him, hear him singing in a language that had the hairs on the back of his neck stand up

.

He woke on the kitchen floor and blindly used the chairs to climb to his feet. He could not afford to fall asleep again. 

One good thing about this happening at home was that he could find his way around with his eyes closed. 

He pushed open the door to the basement, and, leaning heavily on the banister, he made his way downstairs. 

Faintly, through the block in his ears, he heard a shout. Oh, right, his parents would be down here. 

Something hit him in the chest, and the world went fuzzy again. 

Figures that they wouldn’t recognize him. 

.

He was no longer chained, but he couldn’t move. Not on his own. 

He could, however, feel Phantom moving him around, as if he was a giant doll. 

“You’re starting to understand,” said Phantom. “Not that it really matters.” He put something- a cup? - in Danny’s hand. “If you must blame someone for all this, blame your parents, not me… At least, that’s what I would say if you had any control over what you feel. But you don’t.” As if to illustrate his point, Phantom put his hand on Danny’s chest, and Danny began to purr again. A feeling of euphoria washed over him.

This wasn’t so bad.

.

“Danny?” someone was shaking him. “Jack, look at his mouth… his hair…”

“It’s just like the doll!”

“You don’t think-? Quick! Turn it off! Separate the mirrors!”

.

“Do you think it really-?”

“When we cleaned Danny up and cut his hair, the doll changed, too. We need to do this, otherwise who knows how long this possession will last for?”

Heat swept over his body. 

.

He woke, aching, with the sense that a great deal of time had passed. His eyes eased open a sliver, and he winced away from a bright light overhead. 

He was in the lab.

Heart hammering, he shot up, wildly trying to get away.

“Danny! Danny, calm down!” Large hands clamped around his shoulders. “Danny, breathe,” commanded his father. 

It occurred to Danny that he wasn’t strapped down and that Jack was calling him by name. He stopped trying to escape. 

“What happened?” he asked, voice rough and cracked.

He’d been lying on an examination table, and as he looked around the room, he saw evidence of a struggle, and broken glass on the floor. Maddie walked towards him, a large glass specimen jar in her hands. 

There was a doll inside. A large one, about the size of Jazz’s prized teddy bear, Bearbert Einstein. Danny recognized Jack’s careful handiwork. The doll was well made and incredibly detailed. 

It was also a doll of him. Phantom him, anyway. 

Danny stared. 

“We were trying to catch Phantom in this,” said Maddie. “The theory was that, using mirrors and a few other ritual components, we could force Phantom into the doll, after which he would be helpless and harmless. But it seems like he possessed you in order to avoid being drawn in.” She sighed. “We’re so sorry, Danny. We didn’t even consider how you might be affected.” She put down the jar. “We made sure that Phantom wasn’t in you, anymore, though.”

“How?” asked Danny. 

“Our Fenton Possession-Away-Spray!” said Jack. “Worked like a charm! You got a bit of a fever, though.”

Danny knew that the Possession-Away-Spray didn’t do anything except make ghosts a little warm, so he sighed in relief. “That’s good to know,” said Danny, weakly. 

His eyes drifted to the doll in the jar. He could sort of… feel it. As if it were attached to him. 

That could be a problem.

.

Danny crept down the stairs into the lab. His parents were asleep upstairs. He had checked. He didn’t want them asking questions about why he was stealing the Phantom doll from the lab. 

He didn’t have to search for it, even though it had been put in an out of the way cupboard. As soon as he had gotten to the lab, he knew exactly where it was.

Stories about rogue _ushabti,_ poppets, and soul jars flicked across his mind. He shook his head, trying to clear it. 

He pulled the specimen jar out of the cupboard and stared at the doll inside.

It was cute, he had to admit, a soft, round, childish version of himself. The doll’s eyes were glow-in-the-dark enamel buttons with a shiny silver rim. The doll’s hair looked like individual strands of silk. Danny recognized the suit material as being genuine Fentonworks hazmat, probably leftovers from when his parents had made his own suit. He shuddered. The colors were a little off, compared to what they were now, but as far as being the genuine article went… They had even included a tiny model Fenton Thermos. 

Cute. Cute, but creepy. 

Carefully, he unscrewed the lid on the jar and removed the doll. At once, he was struck by a feeling of vertigo. He could _sense_ the doll. Not directly, not exactly. He couldn’t, for example, feel his own hands around his waist, but he sort of had the mental sensation of holding himself. 

Yeah, he needed to put this somewhere safe, somewhere his parents wouldn’t be able find it to experiment on. He’d just have to hope they wouldn’t make another one. 

He had to wonder, though. Was he connected to the doll simply because of the way it looked, or did the mirror trap make it like this? 

No, it had to be the latter, otherwise his skin would crawl whenever he walked by Paulina’s locker. 

Great. 

Danny crept back up the stairs, to his room. Most of the time, when he wanted to hide something, he would stick it in the walls. That would be fine for the doll, too, right?

He made his hands intangible and shoved the little effigy in.

His heart leapt up into his throat. _No. Bad._

He pulled the doll out, breathing heavily, and trying to shake his sudden claustrophobia. Okay. That wasn’t going to work. Okay. 

What else could he do with it? Just hide it in the open? No, his parents came into his room too often. Jazz? Same problem. 

A lot of the time, his first instinct with dangerous ghost artifacts was to pawn them off on Clockwork. However, he couldn’t do that this time, not with this one. Clockwork was under the control of the Observants, and the Observants _despised_ Danny. The idea of them getting their hands on this made him sick to his stomach. 

Could he give it to Pandora? Where would she put it? In one of her boxes, with all the captured evils of the Ghost Zone? No. Considering his reaction to putting it in the wall, he was going to give that a hard pass.

Frostbite would take it but living arrangements in the Far Frozen were very open. There was little privacy, and Frostbite couldn’t always keep it with him. He had a Realm to run. 

Dora? Maybe. He liked the dragon princess, but he didn’t know her nearly as well as the others. She was more Sam’s friend.

There wasn’t anywhere else in the Ghost Zone for him to put it. If he’d had his own lair, that would be different, but he didn’t. Maybe the best way of dealing with this was to just make sure no one found out. 

He still couldn’t leave it in this house, which left two options: Sam and Tucker. Maybe it was sexist of him, but a Phantom plushie would probably be less remarkable in Sam’s room than Tucker’s.

He glanced at the clock and winced. It was late, but he really wanted this taken care of, and _now._ He didn’t think that he’d be able to sleep with the doll in his room. 

When he went ghost, the eerie sensation he got from the doll doubled. At least doubled. Maybe tripled. He wasn’t sure. It just felt… more. Which made sense, he guessed. The doll looked more like this version of him, anyway. 

He phased through his window and flew over Amity Park to Sam’s. She was going to be so mad at him for waking her up.

Or maybe not. Her window glowed in the night, illuminated by her desktop monitor. 

Danny rapped on the glass, getting her attention. She jumped, but motioned for Danny to come in. 

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” he asked, as soon as he had phased through the wall. 

“I’m a creature of the night,” said Sam. “What’s your excuse?”

“I’m… also a creature of the night.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. 

“I am literally a ghost.”

“I guess. Are you hurt?”

“No. Not really. I- Um.” Shoot. How was he going to explain this?

“Why do you have a plushie of yourself?”

Oh, good, an opening. “Mom and Dad tried to trap Phantom me in it. It didn’t work, now it’s connected to me and I need to hide it somewhere.”

“Oh. Huh. Okay, I wasn’t expecting that, I’m going to admit.” She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand. “Dang, we can’t leave you alone for a minute, can we? Gonna have to come visit during weekends, more.” She yawned. “You gonna be at school tomorrow? You look awful.”

“I think Mom and Dad might let me take off. The whole thing made me kind of sick, and they noticed that. I’ll explain more later. Just… Can you take care of this?” He offered up the doll. 

Sam took it, and Danny felt a chill go up his spine. Not holding it himself was an improvement, but…

Sam blinked down at the doll, clearly half asleep. She fluffed its hair with one hand, and Danny couldn’t suppress a surprised ‘meep!’

He slapped a hand over his mouth as Sam looked up.

“Was that you?” she asked, laughter at the back of her tone. 

“No,” said Danny. 

Maintaining eye contact, she began to pet the doll. Resentfully, Danny started to purr.

“Have you, like, tested how much this thing can affect you?” asked Sam.

“No,” said Danny, drawing out the ‘o.’ 

“We should probably do that. Just in case. So that you know what it can do. I bet Tucker will have some ideas.”

“Great,” said Danny. “Okay. I guess that makes sense. No pins, though.”

“Please, that’s so pedestrian. What do you take me for? I’ll use feathers.”

Danny smiled slightly. “As long as you’re aware that I’ll have my revenge for everything.”

“Deal,” said Sam. “Now, get out of here. I need my beauty sleep.”

“Right.” Danny floated back but paused at the window. “You’re not going to, like, sleep with it, are you? Because that would be weird.”

“No, that would be weird.”

“Gotcha. Goodnight.”

“Night.”


End file.
